Email Isn’t Dead

Wow, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. And looking back at my first posts from 2009-10, it’s fun to reflect on how things have changed.

Initially, I was using this blog as a way to try and break into the sports industry and writing a lot about the interplay of sports and social media. Then, as I started to get into my career and began creating content elsewhere, the writing here kinda stopped. Entries became sporadic. And I’d like to change that.

Right now, I have a ton of fun stuff going on (and that’s not to say I’m more or less busy than anyone else). I’m grateful to work at Buffer and focus on content and marketing. I’m building my own product, PostReach(new launch coming soon). I write the occasional piece of freelance content. I’m lucky enough to travel a bit. And have just moved in with my girlfriend, Jade.

But no matter what’s going on, I always want to create more. I want to write more and document more as the day’s pass.

So, anyway, all of this to say, I’m going to start writing here more often (I’d like to say I’ll write daily, but we’ll see).

What I write here probably won’t be super in-depth like some of my content over at Buffer. And it won’t be thoroughly edited, so there’ll no doubt be some spelling and grammar errors. My writing here will mainly be brain dumps, and journaling – almost like a daily vlog, but in writing (guess that’s just a blog, right?).

Anyway…onto email

For years now people have been forecasting the end of email. But, for me at least, email is still an incredibly important part of my workflow. Slack has definitely made an impact, and I email colleagues a lot less than I used to. When it comes to communicating people outside of my company, though, email is still #1.

Recently, I’ve been working through the list of people who have created a report and signed up to PostReach to drop them an email about our upcoming Google Analytics integration.

For context, we have:

1,693 sign ups (that’s people who have created a report, logged in with twitter + shared their email address with us)

403blogs connected (this means we automatically track new posts that are published and create reports)

91 active users in the past week

5 paying customers and £185 in our Stripe account (this breaks down at 4 monthly customers at $10 p/m and one Lifetime member at $126, this amount is discounted during our beta phase)

And, though I could pop everyone on our list into MailChimp and send out these emails in ~ 10 minutes. The process of emailing everyone individually has been great.

By carefully sending each email and checking everyone’s account and how they’ve used PostReach, I’ve been able to spot a few things that don’t quite feel right and we’ve been able to ship some quick bug fixes and updates.

The process of emailing everyone individually also feels more genuine. We don’t have a ton of users, or paying customers yet, and building relationships with everyone who has taken the time to check out our tool feels like the right thing to do.

It’s time-consuming, but hopefully worth it 👌

Have you had any experience building relationships with early adopters / customers? I’m all ears to any tips and advice.